Horrifying testimonies seek to lift shroud of silence around ritual sex abuse claims

I've read a bit about the Pitcairn abuse - horrible.... Could you let me know the name of the podcast- I'd be interested in listening?

Great point @User37482

If anyone's interested, Lost Paradise by Kathy Marks is a brilliant book on the Pitcairn abuse saga. It's a grim read but really gets to the core of the abuse.

Often the setting is a religous one - the Satmar sect of Hasidic Jews have a pretty terrible record, and I have knowledge of some breakaway Mormon groups - but really it's a matter of closed communities. It's just that, in our society, closed communities are usually (but not always) minority religious groups.

Yeah I think it’s closed communities. Yasmin Mohammed has had other interviews where she’s spoken to people from other religious groups about abuse thats covered up. Any group that tries to isolate from wider society is a high risk of this kind of thing. It encourages cult like loyalty to the group, horrifying for vulnerable populations within those groups. I really hope anyone who’s been harmed gets justice.

I just started to listen to a podcast about Pitcairns abuse. A police officer is interviewed about the initial allegation and it’s an 18yr old accused of raping an 11yr old. He immediately starts talking about how the 18yr old wasn’t as mature as some and so “the age gap narrows”. He was talking about what is legally a man having sex with someone very much a child at 11yrs old and was immediately trying to minimise. This was in 2006 not the 70’s btw. It tells you a lot about male police officers imo and explains a lot about the blind eye turned to sexual abuse of children in the UK so it doesn’t surprise me when police officers in other countries don’t seem to care much either. Made me fucking miserable and despondent.

One of the problems with articles like this, is that it pushes the narrative of it happening "over there" in different places and different people, not here and not like us.
One of the difficulties imo with the "satanic panic" was that some of the social workers involved were religious themselves and this allowed msm to portray the situation as being one of religion, rather than one of sexual abuse.
Abusers will use any cover to legitimise their behaviour and to silence their victims.

I’ve felt the same. I always had doubts about the way that was all cleared up and it turned out there was no truth to it at all, or so we’re told. On the one had I totally believe social services and other agencies are capable of getting the wrong end of the stick, overstepping and being swept along by trends when they should be able to take a step back (cf genderwoo) - but on the other there is nothing so sexually abusive and grim that there isn’t someone somewhere who’ll do it, and anything involving cultish, secretive or extreme belief and ritual is a risk for sexual abuses also happening.

V disturbing article, as is the podcast from Yasmin. Thank goodness it's being exposed, at least....

I was reading a 2008 Guardian article on the Haredi Jews of Stamford Hill, and this comment underneath caught my eye :

'No analogy between Haredim and Islamic extremism. Haredim want to seperate themselves from the world, not take it over.
Having said that the Haredi community has a lot of problems, many of which it does not deal with itself too well, including child abuse, poverty, poor levels of education.
Should they be "allowed" to mind their own business?. Absolutely yes, so long as they are not breaking the law while doing so
Certainly the last think any 'community' needs is a load of self interested social workers and other local authority nobodies coming along trying to impose some 'strategy' or other on their every day lives.'

So essentially, this commenter acknowledges the child abuse and poor education, but then appears to say the government should not intervene unless criminal, though obvs the first is that, and the second is certainly worrying.'

Could be anti-social worker sentiment, but also illustrates my suspicion that a lot of people don't really care about how the behaviour of too much of the Haredi community affects their children, because unlike fundamentalist Muslims, it usually doesn't endanger people outside the community.

Yes. This thread has reminded me to look out the Yasmin Mohammed youtube; she has a couple of videos about sexism and misogyny in orthodox communities.

Here's one:

Apparently is the operative word in that sentence imo. Given how much of human sexual behaviour is quite ritualistic, coupled with the amount of csa which we know happens, the occurrence of ritualistic csa is more than likely. Could that be dressed up as some form of religion, of course it could. Do I believe in Satan, no; but i do believe that some people pretend to be satanists? Yes I do

I thought this was going to be about the apparently debunked cases in the uk. I have always worried that they might pop up again- that something real may have been at the heart of it.

Closed religious communities often perpetuate these horrors, hope that police investigations and persecutions bring justice to victims.